What happened to telling stories?

I’ve been think­ing a lot recently about how we tell stor­ies. I enjoy writ­ing, and it is obvi­ous to me that the inven­tion of the writ­ten word, and more spe­cific­ally the inven­tion of the print­ing press and mass media, has been more or less the most fun­da­mental revolu­tion in the his­tory of what we now know as lit­er­at­ure. It is abund­antly clear what we have gained by this revolu­tion, and we are quick to cite the many advant­ages: the mass dis­sem­in­a­tion of lit­er­at­ure; a huge increase in lit­er­acy; the pre­ser­va­tion of lit­er­ary and his­tor­ical texts not only for cen­tur­ies and mil­len­nia, but with the advent of digit­isa­tion per­haps infin­itely. But how often do we focus on what we most obvi­ously lost: the Oral Tra­di­tion. By this I mean the art of telling stor­ies, and recit­ing poetry not from any book or record, but from memory. Whilst on the face of it this might seem a small dis­tinc­tion (after all, what is the dif­fer­ence between recit­ing a poem from an antho­logy and mem­or­ising it ver­batim?), the real dif­fer­ence lies in how lit­er­at­ure is trans­ferred from per­son to person.

A lit­er­ary tra­di­tion in a folk­loric idiom, from the Icelandic Saga to the Basque contest-poetry of bertsol­ar­itza has many key dif­fer­ences from a writ­ten one. These stor­ies, passed down from gen­er­a­tion to gen­er­a­tion and often with some degree of impro­visa­tion cre­ate a lit­er­at­ure in con­stant evol­u­tion. It is also a lit­er­at­ure which, apart from a very few respec­ted storytellers, does not elev­ate the author to the revered pos­i­tion that he occu­pies in mod­ern writ­ten lit­er­at­ure — in fact, there is no real concept of author in a story told for so many years that it simply becomes ‘a story’ rather than ‘a story by x’. It is a lit­er­at­ure which applauds devi­at­ing from the ori­ginal, impro­vising, improv­ing, for­get­ting and remem­ber­ing. It is a lit­er­at­ure which thrives on con­stant innov­a­tion. Even in the act of tran­scrib­ing Sagas and other primar­ily oral tra­di­tions we are irre­voc­ably alter­ing the dynamic of a lit­er­at­ure which pre­vi­ously exis­ted in a state of con­stant evol­u­tion and flux. It is also a lit­er­at­ure in which any evol­u­tion is gradual, there are few paradigm shifts, since the basic stor­ies stay more or less the same for dec­ades if not centuries.

There is no solu­tion to this prob­lem. Oral storytelling and tra­di­tion (and by this I more spe­cific­ally I mean the skill of remem­ber­ing and telling stor­ies that are never writ­ten down) is all but dead in first-world west­ern cul­ture. In writ­ten stor­ies, and even in record­ings of stor­ies being told we are cre­at­ing a subtle but cru­cial change in how these stor­ies are trans­mit­ted: we are giv­ing the listener the abil­ity to re-read, re-listen, and there­fore learn much more closely the stor­ies being told. That is to say, the re-teller of a story no longer has to gloss over or make up the parts of the story that he doesn’t remem­ber. How­ever, it seems ridicu­lous not to record a tra­di­tion that is so obvi­ously on the decline. These oppos­ing points of view are equally valid, and I find it almost impossible not to agree, how­ever hypo­crit­ic­ally, with both state­ments. I can­not deny that the writ­ten word, and in most cases mod­ern media, is supremely bene­fi­cial to soci­ety: it allows the devel­op­ment and reten­tion of com­plex ideas and fant­astic levels of cre­ativ­ity through devel­op­ment and revi­sion; it allows us to learn and trans­mit know­ledge in a way that is all but impossible within a soci­ety with no know­ledge of the writ­ten word; it allows the dis­sem­in­a­tion of this know­ledge to pre­vi­ously unthink­able num­bers of people.

But part of me really misses being told a good story.

Related posts:

1. Struc­tur­al­ism, Post-Structuralism and The Death of the Author
2. Sub­ver­sion / Rever­sion: The decon­struc­tion and recon­struc­tion of the West­ern cul­tural nar­rat­ive through a Nat­ive Amer­ican idiom in Thomas King’s Green Grass, Run­ning Water